A number of electronic systems are commonly used to coordinate the offer and sale of products or services, and the display of information for such products or services, in electronic commerce settings. Many types of electronic user interfaces are provided to consumers for accessing electronic commerce information via electronic platforms such as kiosks, smart devices, websites, or mobile apps. For instance, consumers commonly utilize user interfaces on such platforms to identify products and services, obtain information (e.g., location, cost, specifications) on specific products and services, and to make and manage electronic purchases of such products and services.
The shopping and information gathering activity performed in such user interfaces that leads to product and service purchases may involve multiple user activities and inputs within the user interface. Such activities and inputs may include user actions to select hyperlinked content, enter search queries, navigate among different product or service descriptions, and designate or enter purchase information for a selected product or service.
Existing approaches for improving commerce user interfaces often focus on improving the degree of accuracy of searches, listings, advertisements, and features within consumer-facing user interfaces. Further, many existing approaches attempt to generate and modify pre-populated rankings of accompanying search results or product and service listings, in an effort to increase consumer interest and purchase activity for products or services. However, these approaches often do not consider actual user activity, but instead are based on predicted (expected) consumer activity or predefined categories. As a result, commerce user interfaces may end up providing incomplete or irrelevant information, resulting in the use of additional computer resources to locate relevant information and to fulfill consumer purchasing activity.
Additionally, in many existing commerce user interfaces, there is often a need to address a “cold start” problem, where the information system cannot draw correct inferences for items in which sufficient information has not been collected (such as when new or updated products, or product versions, are added to a product catalog). Various approaches that have been attempted to address cold start in commerce search systems have involved manually weighting, changing, or emphasizing certain search results as new items are added or updated, and as old products become discontinued. However, a high degree of administrative oversight and content curation is likely to be required to ensure that new products and services are properly ranked and presented to viewing users.